The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917–1932 by Scott Blackwood (review)

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• The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917–1932 by Scott Blackwood
• Beth Fowler

The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917–1932. By Scott Blackwood. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 199. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-7914-7.)

Scott Blackwood’s examination of the blues artists recorded by Paramount Records, an independent label founded by the Wisconsin Chair Company in 1917 to sell phonograph cabinets, tells numerous tales, both joyful and heartbreaking, of the Black musicians who left their southern homes for better opportunities up north. The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917–1932 is an excellent example of creative nonfiction, as Blackwood uses published oral histories and historical monographs like Alex van der Tuuk’s Paramount’s Rise and Fall: A History of the Wisconsin Chair Company and Its Recording Activities (Denver, 2003) to craft beautifully realized stories about what these journeys must have felt like for Black migrants. Readers get an intriguing glimpse into the inner lives of these musicians as they strummed and sang their way into blues history. But preexisting knowledge of both the Great Migration and the early days of Black American music is essential in order to keep up with Blackwood’s tales, which are divided into short vignettes, largely disconnected from one another, and do not always add up to a coherent story.

From the beginning, readers are plunged into Chicago’s “Black Metropolis” during the Roaring Twenties, which was “Lit like an arc light. Midnight like noon. Hot music plays everywhere, spilling out of cafés, cabarets, theaters, into the street, mixing with the sounds of car horns” (pp. 20, 9). Blackwood shows how blues icons such as Alberta Hunter, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, and Jelly Roll Morton ventured into this hypermodern land of opportunity with dreams that were downright dangerous in their Jim Crow home-towns. Blackwood’s exquisite writing breathes life into each account, making the struggles and joys experienced by his subjects urgent and resonant, providing irresistible nuggets that knowingly allude to other untold stories. He dubs Delta bluesman Charley Patton, for instance, “So enigmatic that people thought he was from somewhere else (‘Up North,’ Willie Brown, his protégé and playing partner, had guessed)” (p. 107). But a familiarity with major texts from Great Migration historiography, like Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, 2010) and James Grossman’s Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989), is essential for forming a narrative out of these intricately crafted insights. Blackwood states that the music he examines reveals “Black America finding its voice,” but more context is necessary for this voice to tell of a more convincing connection between these artists’ experiences and the increasing demand for blues records (p. x).

Paramount’s role in this process is also somewhat unclear, a curious issue for a book that is ostensibly about the label. The book begins with the saddest of Christmas parties in 1932, as the label’s employees received pink slips and then stepped outside to drunkenly “sling the records into the dark, toward the [Milwaukee] river” (p. 2). Blackwood brings readers down to the riverbanks alongside the disenchanted former workers, showing both how the Depression halted production and how it is “remarkable that the Paramount recordings—arguably one of the greatest single archives of America’s rich musical [End Page 453] heritage—exist at all” (p. 2). Although he profiles pivotal recording engineers like J. Mayo Williams and Art Laibly, Blackwood does not otherwise trace Paramount’s origins and growth or provide much exploration of what it meant for the white-owned outfit to pivot toward recording Black artists and selling to (mostly) Black consumers at a time when musical genres were largely segregated in stores and on the radio. Ultimately this book provides an intriguing exploration of the lives and (supposed) mind-sets of the artists and engineers associated with Paramount as the excitement of the 1920s came crashing down into the Depression. But it does not place these...